Jiřina Přibylová

“Of course, my dad secretly listened to the English broadcast, which always began: ‘Thud, thud, thud, thud,’ which is Morse code for ‘V’, meaning victory. And then it was: ‘London calling, London calling.’ And then the news started. President Beneš of the exile government spoke, for instance. Well, I’ll skip that now. We were off to visit Grandma in the countryside by train, and it wasn’t that type of compartmented wagon, it was all in one, with wooden benches. I sat on my father’s lap by the window, and suddenly out of the blue, I guess the train made some strange thumping noise on the rails, I shouted out to the whole wagon: ‘London calling, London calling.’ Everyone froze, Dad immediately started showing me some goats or cows somewhere outside. Well, and at that moment the whole compartment, or the whole wagon, which had about sixty people in it, at that moment they were all deaf, which was just... they pretended they hadn’t heard it. At that moment my parents’ blood ran cold, but it worked out okay.”

“My uncle died there after ten years, and his wife, my second aunt, went to see him because every once in a while they allowed a visit, and when she came there, she told the guard whom she had come to visit. And he said: ‘He doid.’ And my aunt asked: ‘How?’ So he started leafing through the pages, and she asked: ‘Where is he?’ So he kept thumbing through the pages until he found some number, I don’t know, two thousand and something, and that he’d ‘doid’. And she said: ‘Where is he?’ And he said: ‘There!’ And he pointed to a field and told her a number. So she went there and wondered around the field. There were some wooden slats stuck in the earth with poorly legible numbers written on them - they buried them there like dogs. So he’s still there somewhere.”